Number 107
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LEARN LATIN AND MAKE THE BIG BUCKS!
So many things I regret ~ among them, that as a kid I was too lazy to continue lessons in ballet, guitar, and Latin. I started a Latin class in junior high, but it was spring, and my hormones made it impossible for me to concentrate so I dropped out of Latin class. I don't think I learned anything but agricola and of course amo, amas, amat.
What would be the value of Latin, you may ask, for the average person? Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf answers that question very well in "My Case For The Study Of Latin" in the December 30, 2004 edition of The Wanderer. In brief, our Western culture is based on Latin, and the study of Latin trains the mind to think.
Fr. Zuhlsdorf says about his study of Latin (and Greek), "I was suddenly beginning to grasp the meaning of words I hitherto had been constrained to look up in the dictionary. I began recognizing quotations and themes from ancient writers." And his test scores went up in language and reasoning and logic. Various studies show, he writes, that learning Latin correlates with higher scores in all subjects ~ but this result is not the same with the study of other languages.
Dorothy Sayers, author of the mystery series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, advocated a return to the basic medieval curriculum, the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric). Most curricula today have developed from the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). (Note that literature is a fairly recent addition to academic studies; reading literature, and possibly writing it, were considered the natural pastimes of any educated person.) The trivium is the foundation of the rest. Sayers said language study teaches "the structure of a language, and hence of language itself," not just how to order a meal abroad. Dialectic and rhetoric teach how to use language in logical argument.
If you learn Latin, it's easier to learn not only other languages, but other subjects as well, because it gives us our scientific and technical vocabulary, and because many of our original historical documents, and thus the foundations of our culture and governments, were written in Latin. Where did we come from? The study of Latin will help answer that question, in part, just as genealogy answers it, and the study of history, and theology (unless you're exclusively attached to the simian or chemical explanations).
How does learning Latin affect the thinking process? Latin is an inflected language, that is, words have endings that convey their function in a sentence, as to cases, times (tenses), numbers, persons, moods, etc. English has a few ~ I, me, mine, my, go, went, gone, for instance ~ but meaning strongly depends on word order (syntax). And unlike English, the verb is often placed at the end of a sentence in Latin. So what? Fr. Zuhlsdorf writes, "Latin teaches you to search for and make connections between concepts and then hold the thought in your mind as a whole. The way Latin works, with the inflected endings and without a regular word order, the reader or listener must accustom himself to holding concepts in his mind almost as a juggler keeps objects in the air until the pattern is established and the thought becomes clear [that is, until you finally get to the verb]. Latin keeps your mind focused on structure and meaning. You learn to decode the world around you, think about it, and then talk about it intelligently and with style!"
I guess it's too late to become a ballerina, but I could take a Latin class. Maybe even learn to play guitar. If I had children at home, I'd encourage them to take Latin. Listen up, Jude!
Mike Sykes wrote in response to the menu request issue:
Well, you may not go as deep as some people, but you go a lot deeper than I would, especially when you come to class structure. It's all very subtle, of course:
Bring me the menu! A direct order!
Could I see the menu? An almost deferential request.
If it's not too much trouble, do you think I could see the menu? Getting towards sarcasm.
Perhaps the most interesting difference between us is that I at least always ask for *the* menu. Less interesting is that I probably say "Have you got a menu?", meaning on paper, because in some of the pubs I lunch in it may be on a blackboard (chalkboard to you).
Moi: I do say blackboard, that's what I grew up with. Now that most of them are green, maybe students and teachers here have also switched to chalkboard.
Some of the places I eat have the menu on the wall. Like MacDonald's. My favorite, though, was a big painted menu on the wall of a small pizza place in Boston's North End (the Italian neighborhood) that listed the various pizza toppings and so on. You could order "extra oil". I never did.
In a crime novel by Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club: An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery, a young man dies falling from "the gods" in a theater. Smith is Scottish, born in Zimbabe, so I looked for a definition of "gods" in one of the online British dictionaries, and found this: "the seats in a theatre which are at the highest level and the furthest distance from the stage," as I had more or less guessed. The "gods" are high and far away. Not very good theology.
But I couldn't find out where this term originated. Ancient Greek playwrights sometimes used to wrap up a plot by introducing a deus ex machina to solve all the characters' problems, a "god from the machine," literally a god, like Zeus, who appeared on stage in a prop like a cloud or a chariot. (It wouldn't be the Judaeo-Christian god.) This contraption might descend from the theater ceiling. Perhaps this is why "the gods" means the highest seats in a theater. In America, we call it the rafters.
You may have noticed that I've avoided using an extraordinarily rich source of material for Parvum Opus, that is, President George W. Bush. First, he's too easy a target. Second, I truly do not want anyone to draw political conclusions from any comments I might make about his many inexplicable verbal blunders and rhetorical flights. You might be right or you might be wrong. But I just learned about one of his that's too good to ignore. A few months ago he was discussing certain problems in American health care today, maybe doctors' insurance, and he said,
"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country." ~ Sept. 6, 2004, Poplar Bluff, MO. (From The Complete Bushisms at Slate.com).
What rhetorical, grammatical, or logical lessons can we learn from this? I haven't the slightest idea.
As we know, some people, American and otherwise, object to the current war. Yet my little French student's teacher is having her write an essay on why America is getting soft and is no longer the great world power it became after World War II. I told her that I don't think America is getting soft, so I couldn't help her with her essay. Rather than die quietly at home from suicide attacks and whatnot, many Americans are quite willing to travel to kill people to prevent more of the same. Aside from the questions of right and wrong, can you logically call an aggressive country like the US "soft"? I think not. I think it's wishful thinking on the part of the European Union, Al Qaeda, and at least one American middle-school teacher.
By the way, you might be interested in an Al Qaeda training manual that turned up in Manchester, England.
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I have a contribution in a new anthology about the
"center of life", Changing
Course: Women's Inspiring Stories of Menopause, Midlife, and Moving Forward,
edited by Yitta Halberstam.
Copyright Rhonda
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